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His Beatitude Metropolitan Tikhon has designated Sunday, January 26, 2025, as Sanctity of Life Sunday to be observed in the parishes of the Orthodox Church in America. His Beatitude has also released the following statement below. Resources for liturgical prayers and petitions can be accessed on the Sanctity of Life Resource Page.
Sanctity of Life Sunday falls two days after the annual March for Life, scheduled for Friday, January 24, 2025. This date marks the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade ruling that legalized abortion in the United States. Other participants in this year’s march will be members of the Holy Synod of Bishops, representatives from the stavropegial seminaries, and Orthodox Christians from across the country.
The Orthodox gathering at the March for Life will begin with a Divine Liturgy at 9:00 AM at St. Nicholas Cathedral, located at 3500 Massachusetts Avenue NW. Following the Liturgy, participants will meet at 11:30 AM on the National Mall, on Madison Drive between 7th and 9th Streets NW (same location as in 2024). The March for Life Rally will take place from 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM, during which time His Beatitude will lead the Orthodox faithful in a Service of Supplication for an End to Abortion at approximately 12:30 PM.
At 1:00 PM, the March for Life will commence. The Orthodox group will sing hymns while processing and plans to exit the march before its conclusion. However, participants are welcome to continue to the Supreme Court, where the march is scheduled to conclude by 4:00 PM.
You are invited to join His Beatitude and other Orthodox faithful from across the nation in commemorating the victims of abortion and standing in witness to the sanctity of life.
For more information, including location addresses and a full schedule of events, please visit the Orthodox Christians for Life website.
To the Clergy, Monastics, and Faithful of the Orthodox Church in America,
My Beloved Children in the Lord,
As we mark our annual Sanctity of Life Sunday, I would like to speak to you about martyrdom. Specifically, by understanding martyrdom, which we might consider the most pure, fundamental realization of the Christian vocation, we understand just why we hold life sacred.
At first, this may appear paradoxical. Martyrdom, after all, is willingly surrendering one’s life for the sake of the Christian faith. Martyrdom teaches us that life in this world is not to be compared with the glorious and everlasting life that awaits us in the world to come. As the Lord says, “Whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the Gospel’s, the same shall save it” (Mk. 8:35).
Christ promises us in his Beatitudes that “blessed are you when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and say all manner of evil against you falsely for my sake. Rejoice, and be exceedingly glad, for great is your reward in heaven” (Matt. 5:11–12). When we are rejected by the world because we accept the Gospel—when we reject the world in order to take up our Cross—then we display the Christian faith in all its truth and power and glory. Martyrdom, etymologically and in fact, always means “bearing witness,” and the greatest and most fundamental way to bear witness to the Gospel is to die for the sake of the Gospel.
However, martyrdom, even when it points us towards the next life, also testifies to the immeasurable sacredness of our mortal life in this world. Here, in this life, it is possible for us to bear witness; here, in this life, we have the possibility of accepting Christ’s gift of salvation. This is true for the literal martyrs, but it is also possible for every Christian through the bloodless martyrdom of asceticism. Whenever we die to our fleshly desires for the sake of the Gospel, we suffer a little martyrdom. Whenever we forgo power or wealth or gratification for the sake of Christ’s commandments, we are bearing witness, in a small way, to the truth of the Christian faith.
In other words, martyrdom proper, as well as the ascetic martyrdom to which we are all called, are a way of “redeeming the time” (Eph. 5:16). Through Christ’s Incarnation and Passion, the fallen world and passing present age have become an arena of spiritual struggle and the place where salvation is accomplished.
Seen from this perspective, life in this world is not something cheap and utilitarian, but incredibly dear. The Lord gives us this life that we might offer it back to him, fulfilling our primordial role as priest and mediator of creation: man is called to commend himself and his fellow-men and all his life to Christ our God.
All life comes from God; all life belongs to God; and through the saving work of our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ, biological life in this world is now open to the possibility of true and everlasting life in the world to come.
Thus, on this Sanctity of Life Sunday, we bear witness to the truth that all human life, from conception to natural death, is sacred. We pray that the scales will fall from the eyes of our countrymen who do not recognize this basic truth, and we beseech the Lord that all violations of this holy principle—abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, and the rest—would come to a swift end in our age and our land. Finally, we pray that we might find the strength to live in accordance with this teaching, showing forth the sanctity of life by devoting our own life to the pursuit of sanctity, thus bearing witness in our flesh to the truth of the holy Orthodox Christian faith.
Sincerely yours in Christ,
+Tikhon
Archbishop of Washington
Metropolitan of All America and Canada
